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Nectar Gan and Steve George

 

Beijing on high alert as China's first Omicron cluster edges closer weeks before the Olympics

 

Officials in Beijing are on high alert just weeks out from the start of the Winter Olympics, after China's first local outbreak of the Omicron variant spread from the northern port city of Tianjin to the central province of Henan.

 

Tianjin, located just 80 miles (129 kilometers) southeast of Beijing, is testing its entire population of 14 million people after Omicron was detected in at least two local residents Saturday — the country's first reported community spread of the highly transmittable variant.

 

The city reported at least 40 positive cases over the weekend, including 24 children, though health authorities have yet to confirm whether they are infected with Omicron.

 

Tianjin authorities moved quickly to place 29 residential communities under strict lockdown, and ordered citizens not to leave the city unless absolutely necessary. Those who want to to leave must present a negative Covid test taken within 48 hours and obtain approval from their employer or local government offices.

 

But the virus has already spread far outside the city. State media reported Monday that two more Omicron cases had been identified in Anyang city, Henan province, more than 300 miles (480 kilometers) from Tianjin.

 

Genome sequencing of the virus found that it belongs to the same transmission chain as the Tianjin outbreak, according to Henan health authorities. A university student who returned to Anyang from Tianjin on December 28 is believed to have brought back the virus — suggesting the variant has already been spreading in Tianjin for nearly two weeks, at the least.

 

That is particularly worrying news to officials in Beijing, which is fewer than 30 minutes away from Tianjin by high-speed rail.

 

In recent months, Chinese authorities have imposed ever more stringent restrictions to curb local Covid flare-ups as Beijing prepares for the Winter Olympics. An Omicron outbreak on the doorstep of the capital just weeks before the Games kick off on February 4 represents something of a nightmare scenario for officials — who are now likely to ramp up efforts to protect Beijing.

 

"It is impossible for China to return cases to zero before the Winter Olympics, because local outbreaks are springing up one after another," said Jin Dongyan, a virologist at the University of Hong Kong.

 

"The only thing Beijing can do is to learn from the experience of the Tokyo Summer Games and hold the Olympics while community transmission is going on in the country," he said, noting that the event will be held within a tightly-sealed bubble isolated from the local community anyway.

 

Beijing and Tianjin share a short border and are closely linked. An estimated 100,000 people commute regularly between the two cities for work as of 2020, according to the state-run Global Times.

 

In a statement Sunday, the Beijing Center for Disease Prevention and Control advised Beijing residents not to visit Tianjin and those in Tianjin to refrain from traveling to the capital. It also asked commuters between the two cities to work from home. By Sunday evening, train tickets from Tianjin to Beijing could no longer be purchased online.

 

The center also ordered people who arrived in Beijing from Tianjin since December 23 to report to their residential communities, employers or hotels for health monitoring and Covid tests. Those who came from high-risk areas of Tianjin are required to self-isolate at home.

 

Keenly aware of the public health risk and political pressure, Tianjin officials convened a video meeting at 1 a.m. Sunday in a show of their resolution to contain the outbreak.

 

Li Hongzhong, the Communist Party chief of Tianjin, is widely regarded as an ardent supporter of Chinese President Xi Jinping. At the meeting, Li vowed to take "resolute measures" to "make all-out efforts to block the channels of transmission" and fortify Tianjin's role as a "moat" to protect the capital against the virus.

 

Party and government organizations, state-owned companies and public institutions were ordered to take the lead in keeping their employees in Tianjin, while checkpoints were set up at the airport, highways, train stations and ports.

 

All tutoring centers, daycare centers and vocational training centers were closed down, while universities and colleges sealed off their campuses.

 

Tianjin is considered among China's foremost cities. It is one of only four provincial-level municipalities directly under the administration of the central government — alongside Beijing, Shanghai and Chongqing.

 

Tianjin authorities have not ordered a full lockdown that would confine all residents to their homes — the kind that was imposed in the northwestern city of Xi'an last month, which sparked an outcry over food shortages and obstructed medical access.

 

Such a move would be politically fraught and economically damaging — Tianjin is a major port and economic hub, and a stringent citywide lockdown in the lead-up to the Lunar New Year could risk sparking resentment among residents.

 

But news about the cases and travel restrictions already sparked panic buying over the weekend, with residents snapping up groceries and other critical supplies at supermarkets.

 

The Omicron variant is the latest challenge to China's zero-Covid policy. For months, Chinese authorities have tried to keep it outside the country's tightly controlled borders through rigorous testing and lengthy quarantine for international arrivals.

 

Tianjin was the first city in mainland China to detect an imported case of Omicron — in an asymptomatic traveler who arrived from overseas on December 13. Since then, the southern cities of Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Changsha and the eastern province of Zhejiang have all detected imported Omicron cases.

 

Jin, the expert at the University of Hong Kong, said the Omicron outbreak in Tianjin is to some extent expected, as it is virtually impossible for border controls to be completely watertight against the variant. In Hong Kong, authorities are also rushing to contain an Omicron outbreak introduced by an aircrew member.

 

Compared to the Delta variant, Omicron poses an even bigger challenge as it spreads faster and is harder to detect, due to its lower viral load, Jin said.

"Even if Tianjin completes its citywide testing, it might not be able to identify all the cases in the city," he said.

Taiwan and China flex fighter jets

The new year has started with big displays of aerial power on both sides of the Taiwan Strait.

Last week, Taiwan, the democratically governed island which Beijing claims as part of its territory, staged a three-day military drill to show its combat readiness, according to a report from Reuters.

Highlighting the event was a fleet of F-16V fighter jets, which performed an "elephant walk," a maneuver in which a dozen of the US-made jets taxied down a runway at their airbase in the southern city of Chiayi simultaneously.

The F-16s are often the first responders to almost daily incursions of planes from China's People's Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) into Taiwan's Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ), an area around the island into which Chinese flights raise alerts.

Accounts by the Taiwanese Defense Ministry show nine separate PLAAF incursions into Taiwan's ADIZ in the first eight days of this year.

Such incursions reached record high last year, with dozens of Chinese warplanes entering Taiwan's ADIZ on some occasions.

China has never ruled out the possibility of using force to bring Taiwan under its control.

"With the very high frequency of Communist planes entering our ADIZ, pilots from our wing are very experienced and have dealt with almost all types of their aircraft," Taiwan Air Force Maj. Yen Hsiang-sheng said at the drill, according to Reuters.

Meanwhile, the PLAAF has been busy with drills of its own, pitting its top-of-the-line J-20 stealth fighters against others in its inventory in mock combat, according to a report Sunday in the state-run Global Times.

"J-20 shows high combat readiness in New Year combat training," read the headlines on the Global Times article.

The report said J-20s took on J-16s and J-11 fighters in mock combat, scoring victories even though the J-20s carried a part to negate their stealth advantage and make them more visible to radar.

"In real combat, it is … possible that a powerful enemy could find a way to detect stealth aircraft, so such training is practical," the Global Times report said, citing an unnamed expert.

The twin-engine J-20 would be considered a superior opponent to Taiwan's F-16s.

A tougher adversary for the Chinese stealth fighters would be the US Air Force's F-22 twin-engine stealth fighter.

Last summer, more than two dozen of those jets converged on the US island of Guam for exercises in what experts said was a US message of combat readiness intended for China.

With US support for Taiwan showing no signs of diminishing, the aerial displays over the skies of the Asia-Pacific are likely just beginning for 2022.

Lunar New Year approaches

A postal worker shows "Year of the Tiger" stamps on January 5 in Nanjing, Jiangsu province, China. On Wednesday, China issued a set of tiger-patterned stamps to mark the Year of the Tiger, ahead of Chinese New Year on February 1.

China's largest private education company laid off 60,000 employees after Beijing's far-reaching crackdown last year. 

 

New Oriental Education's billionaire founder Yu Minhong confirmed the massive shakeup in a post on his WeChat account over the weekend, adding that the company encountered "too many changes in 2021."

 

He added that the company's operations are in uncertain territory because of "policies, the pandemic and international relations."

 

The New York-listed firm is one of the most high-profile casualties of China's sweeping restrictions on the country's $120 billion private tutoring sector. Last July, Beijing banned such companies from turning a profit or raising funding on stock markets, upending the entire sector.

 

The crackdown was part of a broader campaign against what Beijing saw as unruly private industry. Regulators accused companies of providing excessive tutoring that overwhelmed children and placed too much of a financial burden on parents, all while exacerbating social inequality. 

 

Since those restrictions were announced, authorities have ordered those education businesses to suspend online and offline tutoring classes.

 

New Oriental, famous for its after-school tutoring services, laid off 60,000 staff members over the last year, Yu said. The company had more than 88,000 full-time employees and about 17,000 contract teachers as of May 2021, according to its latest annual report. 

 

Yu did not say whether any of the 60,000 employees were contract workers.

 

Yu added that New Oriental's revenue fell 80%, while its market capitalization shrank 90%.

 

The private tutoring ban shocked parents and left many businesses struggling. It also triggered a sharp selloff of Chinese education companies in New York and Hong Kong. That was a sudden reversal of fortune for those companies, which had been stock market darlings in recent years and attracted billions of dollars from big investors like Tiger Global Management and SoftBank Group. 

 

In late July, Goldman Sachs estimated that the regulations wiped out $77 billion within a week, from the market value of overseas-listed Chinese tutoring companies.

Around Asia

• Myanmar's ousted civilian leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, was sentenced to another four years in prison on Monday, the second round of verdicts against the Nobel prize winner.
• At least 164 people have been killed and more than 5,000 detained during violent upheaval in Kazakhstan this week.

• A fire swept through a Rohingya refugee camp in southeastern Bangladesh on Sunday, destroying hundreds of homes, though there were no immediate reports of casualties.

• An infant boy handed in desperation to a soldier across an airport wall in the chaos of the American evacuation of Afghanistan has been found and was reunited with his relatives in Kabul on Saturday.